The Worlds Within Worlds of Vittorio Rossi

by: Gregory J. Reid

In Irony’s Edge, Linda [Bortolotti] Hutcheon observes that irony is made possible and “happens” when “discursive communities” (groups which might share, for example, a gender or ethnicity or profession or interests or a particular awareness) overlap within the lives and experiences of particular individuals making simultaneous, multiple and often contradictory interpretations of texts and events possible (89). Hutcheon offers her own gender, class, profession, colour and Italian-Canadian “crypto-ethnicity” as potential sources of irony. The career and imbricated worlds of first-generation Italian-Anglo-Québécois-Canadian actor/playwright Vittorio Rossi 1 and the contradictory reception of his work by audiences and the press display some particularly sharp-edged ironies. Three critics--Ray Conlogue, Kate Taylor and Pat Donnelly--stand out as speaking with the voice of authority from their positions in the mainstream press while they, in fact, based on the available evidence, present minority, dissenting opinions on the plays on Vittorio Rossi.

Although best known as a playwright (and relatively little known as an actor) in the United States, Canada and, in particular, in English

Quebec; in French Quebec, after having played the role of Detective Tom Celano on Omerta : la loi du silence, the number-one-rated television show in Quebec from 96 to 98, Rossi is first and foremost identified as an actor (and comparatively little recognized as a playwright). While he was still a largely unknown playwright in the English community, Rossi’s first full-length play, The Chain , broke attendance records at Centaur Theatre, English Quebec’s main stage. In his memoir, now-retired Centaur Artistic Director, Maurice Podbrey, describes Rossi’s contribution to the evolution of Centaur and its audience.

Discovering the multicultural side of Montreal has been a major element of our evolution.

Once we began to present Vittorio Rossi’s plays, Italian audiences began to come to the Centaur in increasing numbers. We had difficulty at first because they did not go to English-language cultural events. Moreover, they seem to go out only on weekends, as we discovered with full houses Friday to Sunday. (102)

Perhaps the explanation lies somewhere in Podbrey’s comments on the “difficulty” of dealing with an Italian clientele, but for its inaugural season under the new Artistic Director, Gordon McCall, Centaur declined to produce Paradise by the River , Rossi’s play about the internment of Italian Canadians during World War II. The play (first

conceived as a CBC television series) had been in development for five years. Upon learning that Rossi’s script had been refused by Centaur, a consortium of Italian-Canadian businessmen approached Rossi to produce the play. Having arranged to rent Centaur’s facilities for the Paradise production, Rossi reports being “stunned to see how cold-shouldered the Centaur was to me.” 2

Rossi began his play-writing career by winning the Best New Play Award at the Quebec Drama Festival twice: for “Little Blood Brother” in 1986 and for “Backstreets” in 1987--both presented at Centaur. Though The Chain , produced in 1988, broke records, Rossi’s next play at Centaur, Scarpone , produced in 1990, had an even better percentage of seat sales through its run (94% of capacity). The Last Adam , produced in 1994, enjoyed both critical and popular success and won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Drama in 1996. Love and Other Games (1995), though not critically acclaimed, was a popular light comedy, and the reprise of “Little Blood Brother” in 1997 was part of a production called Mainly Montreal which sold out its run and was extended for two weeks. Not only did Centaur choose to turn its back on its most popular playwright of the last decade but, at the same moment that Centaur was developing a discourse of being the English voice of Quebec, 3 it snubbed the single largest group of English speakers in the province--the Italian community. 4

Under the circumstances, Rossi’s moving more committedly into the television and film “business” was over-determined. The term “business” appears as readily in Rossi’s conversation as it does in his plays (Rossi’s major plays invariably contain a sub-plot related to running a business.) Rossi’s explanation for why he has decided to put a stop to what appears to have been quite a successful acting career is that “there is nothing about the profession that is run like a business.” Since graduating with a BFA in Theatre Performance from Concordia University, Rossi has played some 25 different parts in film, theatre and television, including principal roles in the television series Urban Angel and Malarek, and in many of his own plays. Although French is his third language, the greatest successes he has acted in have arguably been the French language television and film productions: Le Sphinx , Omerta, and the recent, award-winning film Post Mortem . 5 When asked about his acting career Rossi states frankly, “I started to get very frustrated as an actor, very frustrated. I’ve been with this for twelve years now and a lot of my friends around me are so depressed because they work, they work, they work and they don’t move up.” Rossi decries the absence of what he calls a “star system” in English Canada.

When I say a ‘star system’, I know it denotes something egotistical but I don’t know what other term to use. It’s something every nation has . . . . Here an English Canadian actor does not even have what a Quebec actor has. That’s the irony. Quebec has a smaller

market, yet their actors who are on the same level in terms of experience or whatever; they are way ahead. They are on a totally different level.

Rossi’s ongoing projects include the script of The Dishwasher , a feature-length film based on an American novel but to be set in Canada for director Denys Arcand; an English language television series which Rossi is co-writing with Luc Dionne, the wunderkind of Quebec television who created and scripted Omerta ; and the film version of Scarpone which Rossi has already adapted and will be directing himself. To Rossi’s multiple worlds (Italian, Anglo-Québécois, English Canadian, Franco-Québécois and North American) and careers (acting, writing, directing in theatre, television and film) we can also add the Ontario Shakespearian stage and the role of translator. Rossi describes his work translating Eduardo de Filippo’s Filumena for the 1997 Stratford Festival as an apprenticeship for his present role as an adaptor.

. . . the first draft . . . was to just translate the information . So now I used that first draft as the new bible . . . . I had every little bit of information even these archaic sayings that would make no sense in English--I put them in. . . . and what I think I succeeded in doing, that Cimolino, the director, wanted, that the other versions didn’t have, was using the English language but keeping the Italian speech

rhythms, . . . and that’s similar to the system I used for the movie script.

“Italian speech rhythms” are, in fact, the marker of all of Rossi’s plays. However, as a student, young Vittorio Rossi adamantly refused to allow his Italian heritage to filter into his writing. Rossi quotes himself as young man as saying “ahhh, we’re in Canada, who wants to see a bunch of Italians.” Ironically, it was an English professor (John Lucas) who, in Rossi’s words, “yanked it out of me”, who

. . . injected this pride in me. Though my father was doing it to me all my life; sometimes there was an antagonism. See he was a little rough around the edges. So sometimes a son grows up . . . we got along ... but you just accepted . . . okay pa, every time there is something happening in the world, there is always an Italian who could do it better, right? Is that the idea, you know? But when an English professor, an educated man, you know, a very educated man, is telling you, well look, Italians are not the best at everything, but they do a lot of good things and they were good in the past . . . suddenly you were inspired by this.

Although Raymond Bernatchez, in his review of Paradise by the River for La Presse, waxes poetically that “En écoutant son texte, je me prenais à rêver que Rossi entreprenne de tisser, avec la communauté francophone, des liens similarires à ceux établis depuis 20 ans par son

prédécesseur, le dramaturge Marco Micone” (B9) [Listening to his text, I found myself dreaming that Rossi might undertake to establish, with the Francophone community, links similar to those established over 20 years by his predecessor, the playwright Marco Micone], Rossi confesses to being somewhat mystified by Micone whom he has never met but acknowledges as being “big on the French side.” Moreover, although Rossi has a circle of Italian-Canadian friends who are actors, he is not part of any network of Italian-Canadian writers. Rossi was the recipient of the 1994 Premio Award (sponsored by the Canadian Italian Business Professionals Association) for the contribution his work has made, but he does not see his role as a playwright being to represent the Italian-Canadian community. As Rossi points out, the Italian content of his plays comes from the basic premise of “writing what you know about” or the somewhat more poignant edict “be yourself, be honest.” While Rossi’s Italian background may have helped to garner a large and loyal following from Montreal’s ethnic communities, in terms of the critical reception of his work, “honesty” and “identity politics” have proven a disadvantage or, at the very least, have divided the critics.

The Last Adam reinforces the inherent modernity of tragedy by daring to retell an Oedipus-like story in the contemporary Quebec setting of Ville Emard, the largely Italian Montreal suburb where Rossi grew up. Salvatore Leone is both deeply attached to yet alienated from his family, and suspects that his inability to progress with his life is connected to the

mysterious death of his twin brother twenty-seven years earlier--a death which Sal is convinced his father, Armando, must be responsible for. The night I saw The Last Adam , the entire caste, lead brilliantly by Richard Zeppieri in the role of Salvatore, delivered a performance that was charged, tight and sharp-edged. When the house lights came up, the audience was shaken, some were in tears. Here was a play, set and presented in the 1990s, written by a young playwright (Rossi would have been 32 at this point) which tapped into the rich affect of Greek tragedy and brought it home, through the conduit of Italian ethnicity, to a contemporary audience.

In his review of The Last Adam for The Gazette , Arthur Kaptainis captures many of my own reactions to the play when he observes that Rossi understands that “elemental passions, as in Sophocles and real life, are unleashed only with dire consequences”; that Rossi had “convincingly set his Oedipal drama in Quebec” and finally, that Rossi had shown us “an old lesson, worth learning again” (E11).

By comparison, Ray Conlogue’s belittling and dismissive review of the same play in The Globe and Mail left me dumbfounded. However, reading Robert Nunn’s analysis of the theatre critic’s career, in Exploring Our Boundaries, it becomes clear that Conlogue’s critique of The Last Adam was typical, if not inevitable. Nunn concludes that Ray Conlogue’s theatre criticism is “a tissue of contradictions” (403). The

key contradiction, which seems to predetermine Conlogue’s negative response to The Last Adam, is his apparent celebration of community in contrast to his adherence to traditional liberal humanist notions of universality. As Nunn observes:

As long as the community celebrating itself in the theatre can be read as a metonymy of the universal human community, all is well. Thus, black South African theatre can be seen as an expression of a universal desire for liberation. But if the community in question cannot be universalized so readily, Conlogue is likely to decide not only that he has not seen a good piece of theatre, but that he has not seen a piece of theatre at all. (397)

When Conlogue reviews The Last Adam , his resistance to its ethnicity is so obfuscating that he is unable even to recognize it as a clear example of tragedy. He claims derisively that “Rossi takes the kind of accident that newspapers call a ‘tragedy’--a child’s death caused by somebody’s momentary inattention--and tries to turn it into a full-blown, Arthur Miller-type family tragedy. (A View from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, perhaps)” (C1). The Last Adam is about the accidental death of a child in the same sense that Oedipus the King is about a traffic jam (and the subsequent “road rage” which killed King Laius at the cross roads). Conlogue’s allusion to A View from the Bridge signals his preference for Italian drama which is “universal” and hence all the better if written by a

non-Italian. In keeping with this overall perspective, Conlogue lionizes Grace, Sal’s “young sister who is trying to break with the family’s inbred ethnic culture by going out and training as a designer” as "the only competent person in sight" (C1).

Though Conlogue describes Grace as "the only member of the family who has taken the trouble to live in the larger world of Montreal and get to know Quebeckers" (C1), Grace lives in Ville Emard with her parents and, as far as we know, always has. Her only claim to a broader knowledge of Quebec and the Québécois is: "I go to school with them, they're in my classes" (28). From this shaky premise Conlogue concludes that

. . . had this promising thread been developed [Grace's allegedly broader vision] the dramatic stakes might have been raised: We could see the Leones' pain as part of a larger failure of immigrants to integrate into a new society. But this does not occur. The play collapses into the overheated pressure chamber of a suburban household, and implodes meaninglessly into itself. (C1)

Conlogue’s intimation that the play can only achieve “meaning” if the marginalized “immigrant” culture submits and sublimates itself to the dominant, hegemonic cultural mainstream is a painful anachronism, especially when it is published in the national newspaper of a country which celebrates itself as a cultural mosaic.

There are numerous similarities between The Last Adam and A View from the Bridge, including Arthur Miller’s vision of tragedy. In the introduction to his Collected Plays , Miller writes:

I take it that if one could know enough about a human being one could discover some conflict, some value, some challenge, however minor or major, which he cannot find it in himself to walk away from or turn his back on. . . . . I take it, as well, that the less capable a man is of walking away from the central conflict of the play, the closer he approaches a tragic existence. (7)

Rossi's Salvatore Leone and Miller's Eddie Carbone ( A View from the Bridge ) share the tragic existence of a victim of self-inflicted fate, being stripped of the connection to family and community and ideology necessary to a sense of self worth and of self. Conlogue claims there is a "fatal misjudgment as to the scale of the story" in The Last Adam (C1), but this is a claim that can only be made in the absence of any clear notion of tragedy and by failing to take into account the importance of ethnicity and myth in creating the drama’s inevitability and tragic resonance. Mythologies, local custom and communal belief systems, which end up divided against themselves, were as necessary to the tragedies of the Greeks, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams and Miller as they are to Rossi’s. In The Last Adam the Italian-Canadian, ethnic situation creates the conditions for tragedy by establishing the confined

environment and ‘the situation which cannot be walked away from’ and, at the same time, by alluding to larger, mysterious visions and mythologies which give the drama its resonance of scale. For the Leones, the death of their child is more than what the newspapers might call a “personal tragedy” because of the primordial importance the notion of family holds for them and because the circumstances of and events subsequent to Adamo’s death are permeated with myth and superstition. References to the "evil eye," the chain of garlic hung from the door to keep away evil spirits, superstitions about twins, not to mention Catholic notions of sin and divine punishment provoke and amplify the final tragedy. Their annual ritual remembrance of Adamo, carried on for twenty-seven years after his death, is motivated not by piety and duty alone, but by a fear of evil, an evil which has marked them no less than fate marked the great families of Greek tragedy.

Rosalia, Salvatore’s mother, forewarns him of what she will do in the end of the play by telling him the story of her cousin who made her watch while he strangled a rabbit then beat it when it would not die. Blood-spattered and holding back tears young Rosalia learned and now remembers her cousin's lesson. “That day I ate the same rabbit. At the dinner table, Luigi looked me straight in the eye and said never forget that your family always comes first. You do what you have to do to keep it alive. He taught me how to survive.” She tells Salvatore, ". . . we've been good to you. But now I tell you this: Don't, don't play with my

family. Lascia stare. Or you will learn the hard way. Just like when I was a little girl" (90). In the end, Salvatore, as his name suggests, becomes not the child who learns a hard lesson, but the sacrifice which must be offered for the salvation of the family. The New Jerusalem Bible glosses "the last Adam" (I Corinthians) as Jesus, "the second, perfect, heavenly Adam." The impact of the sacrifice, Salvatore’s suicide, is all the greater because it is consciously provoked by the Black Madonna figure of the play, Rosalia, his own mother. 6

If Conlogue seems to be blaming Rossi for being Italian; in her reviews of The Chain , Scarpone and Love and Other Games , Pat Donnelly, theatre critic for The Gazette seems to blame him for being a man. The general content of Donnelly’s review of The Chain seems typical of what critics and journalists have noted in this play--social realism, Rossi’s ethnicity, the production problems (the director and lead actor of The Chain resigned two weeks before the opening), and comparisons with Marco Micone and David Fennario. The Chain

( catennacio ) takes its name from a defensive strategy used by the Italian national soccer team when they won the World Cup in 1982. The plot revolves around sibling rivalry in two generations. Out of hubris and a desire to impress his long estranged brother, Ubaldo, Papa Testa has turned over the running of his landscaping business to his younger son Massimo, a university student, to incorporate. Massimo’s ambition and inexperience cause him to take on a number of underbid contracts

and drive the company into financial ruin. Joe, the older, neglected son and workhorse of the company is thrown into a rage because he has been passed over and because the financial straights of the company force his father to lose face by having to accept money from Ubaldo. The core of the play is the process of Joe working out his anger which reaches its cathartic peak on the day of his cousin Rina’s wedding to the only wasp character in the play, Michael, an accountant who has been advising Massimo. Joe focuses his rage first on Massimo, then on Michael in a form of reverse racism, then on Ubaldo, and finally on his own father. It is only when the family agrees to declare bankruptcy and start over from scratch with a new name (The Chain), a new owner (Joe), a new set of workers (themselves) and Papa Testa’s old truck that the family is saved from complete disintegration.

Whereas Marianne Ackerman, reviewing the play for The Globe and Mail , assesses The Chain as “a promising debut” because of Rossi’s “witty dialogue,” “intense characters” and an “outstanding performance” by Ron Lea as Joe (C7); Pat Donnelly claims Rossi “has obviously bitten off more than he can chew” and finds the characters “extraneous” and “stereotypical,” the plot “sketchy” and the dialogue “excessive” (H5).

The element of Donnelly’s review which seems to have proven most irritating to Rossi is her observation that “Italian is frequently spoken in

The Chain , but there’s not a syllable of French” (H5). The contention that a play about an Anglo-Italian family set in the backyard of a duplex in Rossi’s home neighbourhood of Ville Emard had to include French dialogue leaves Rossi non-plussed. Donnelly complains that Rossi “sidesteps political issues” and that in the play “no-one breathes a word about bill 101" [the Quebec language law] (H5). In The Last Adam

Sal does in fact react violently to “the sign law.” Ironically, Alastair Sutherland in his article on Rossi in Maclean’s describes exactly that scene as epitomizing “what people love--and hate--about Rossi” and goes on from this scene to discuss the view that “the plays perpetuate a damaging ethnic stereotype . . .” (54). Today Rossi is clearly not interested in taking on language issues, as he says “I think people waste too much energy on that stuff. Learn the language and get on with it, you know.”

Whatever the assessment of how effectively Donnelly has critiqued The Chain or the validity of her claim that Rossi passed up an opportunity to develop an important Québécois and English Canadian social conflict, her review of a first major production of a local, 27-year-old playwright who was charting new ground in his portrayal of the Anglo-Italian Quebec community was distinctly un-generous. A clue to Donnelly’s rancour perhaps lies in her description of The Chain ’s “macho f-word dialogue” (H5). Donnelly’s point of view becomes clear when she characterizes Scarpone as “disturbingly

chauvinistic” (H9). While Donnelly concedes that in Scarpone “Rossi clearly means to expose anti-woman attitudes,” she complains that “he can’t stop himself from revelling in them” (H9).

Scarpone (Italian for “clodhopper”) is the story of one day--the last day--in the life of a shoe store. (Rossi sold shoes for a number of years before Maurice Podbrey gave him his break at Centaur.) Donnelly’s ‘anti-dialogistic’ complaint is “. . . not so much that Rossi uses Dino and Giancarlo as mouthpieces for a special Italian brand of male rage but that he loses control and allows their voices to prevail. What could be a tough critique of a retrograde mentality dissolves into an apologia for it” (H9). Despite Donnelly’s claim of the absence of a tough critique, when Dino, the salesman-hustler with payments to make on his Corvette and ambitions to become store manager, discovers he is not going to be promoted and explodes at Rosanna, the present manager, in the most insulting terms he can muster, not only does she coolly and solidly put him in his place, but he is ostracized by the other salesmen and left sputtering, exposed, isolated and with no option but to quit his job and the scene with a final “Fuck you all!” (146). Although Rossi willingly admits that “I may have been caught up in the early plays with trying to capture something I know” and comments bemusedly that “I realized when I was adapting it [ Scarpone ] that the play never had a plot,” the thread that holds the play together is the decline and deconstruction of the macho womanizer and the exposing of his

ethnocentrism and misogyny. Peeling away the layers of this particular stereotype, the “whore master,” is also a central thread of Love and Other Games .

Rossi describes Love and Other Games as his attempt “to do something light.” In an interview with Pat Donnelly before the play, Rossi seemed to hedge his bets with the reviewer by commenting that “There are only three Italian characters in the play,” that “the play itself does not rest on the shoulders of an Italian family” and that it is “not as openly aggressive as all my other plays” (C7). In the interview Rossi worried out loud that “My fans from Ville Emard are going to be confused” (C7). To this day, Rossi remains convinced that he has been so pegged as a playwright of an intense, edgy style of drama that “if someone else had written it, [ Love and Other Games ] probably would have been more appreciated.”

Looking at Donnelly’s review, Rossi may have a point. After discounting the audience’s response to Love and Other Games (“If you count the number of laugh lines that actually make people laugh, then Vittorio Rossi’s Love and Other Games . . . is a success. If you look for more, it is a disappointment.”(D7)), she describes it as “partly a rewrite of an earlier Rossi work, In Pursuit of a Cow , which ruffled a few feathers when presented at Dawson College a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, this fuzzy, neutralized version isn’t likely to upset

anyone” (D7). There are superficial similarities between In Pursuit of a Cow and Love and Other Games --both plays include a bartender named Jimmy and use a bar setting, both use expressionistic shifts of time and place, and Pursuit opens on a discussion of dating and relationships--but in terms of tone and substance these plays are at opposite ends of the spectrum. In Pursuit of a Cow , commissioned by Dawson’s Dome Theatre, is an ambitious play in which 15 characters from a variety of worlds within Rossi’s reckoning--the street, the bar, the theatre, the fourth estate-- are brought together, both before and after the fact, by the murder of two women by a deranged gunman. The play was produced three years after 14 women had been gunned down at l’École Polytechnique of the Université de Montréal and obviously alludes to these murders; however, the point of view and issues of the play emerge as distinctly masculine. Despite a story having been built up by his friends and fellow witnesses that Tony, the central character of the play, had made a brave move to stop the gunman as he attacked Gloria (Tony’s girlfriend), he is forced to admit in the climactic revelation of the play that

I never moved, Wally! Do you hear me? I never moved! Jimmy, you saw the whole thing! How did all this fucking start? All these lies! I NEVER MOVED! MY GLORIA WAS SHOT AND I NEVER FUCKING MOVED! I froze. That’s what happened! I froze like a fucking coward! (175)

Donnelly’s gambit of using this, one of Rossi’s philosophically, structurally and emotionally challenging plays, as the set up for her review of Love and Other Games , more or less announces, the reviewer’s intention not to enter into the spirit of the light comedy. The result is a contradictory swipe at a romantic comedy of interconnected vignettes about the single’s scene in the 90s because the play will “not upset anyone” and “is without a family to hold firm the centre” (D7).

Despite Donnelly’s complaint that “It’s not only unclear what the play is about . . . but who it is about” (D7), Love and Other Games is quite obviously about four very diverse “couples” and how character types and traits play against each other through the rituals of heterosexual dating and mating. Lucio and Susie, who form the most protracted relationship of the play, are a perfect case of rake meets flake. If the play has a mean streak it comes out in our delight and fascination at the pain these two are able to inflict on each other and their mutual unmasking. About this relationship Donnelly observes:

The Susie-Lucio fling ends with a heated argument that gives him the opportunity to lash out at her with his peculiar brand of convoluted logic: “It’s women like you who give all the others a bad name. You know why? It’s women like you that make me exist.”

There’s something to that. Line for line, Rossi often strikes gold. (D7)

However, rather than stopping to reflect upon the contradiction of her own reactions to Lucio’s “peculiar” “convoluted logic” as having something to it and being “gold,” Donnelly goes on to claim that Rossi panders to his “sizable local following” “with dialogue that refers specifically to Italians, Ville Emard and Montreal” (D7). Had she given herself or been given the time to reflect, Donnelly might have come to notice that Susie is a woman, though no-one explicitly says so, who thrives on being the object of attention. She appears flighty and indecisive because her only clear objective is to be attended to. For example, though she has no real interest in a relationship with Fernie she keeps him hanging around “as a friend” but, to Fernie’s consternation, in the presence of other women (Nicole or Lira), she immediately begins to act like his girlfriend. Her repeated claims that she is not superficial and constant desire to reveal her personal depth serve to prove her superficiality.

Lucio is a man dedicated to being attentive to women. Donnelly warms to the play “when Lucio tries to pick up Nicole at the bar and she does a devastating put down . . . “ (D7). Although Donnelly had complained about male rage being uncontrolled in Scarpone, this time she regrets that the “gender war [which] brews beneath the surface” is

not allowed more fully onto the stage. Just as Donnelly failed to note the deconstruction of Dino in Scarpone, she seems only half conscious of how Lucio is exposed and undone by Susie when she tells him

. . . I saw the picture in your wallet. The photo you carry of yourself, what is that? A reminder? The fat little boy you were. Is that what the girls called you? “Fatso can’t dance. How can he? With all that blubber?” What a plump young boy you were. So is that it? Some girl you had a crush on wouldn’t dance with you. So you’re on a mission . . . To become what? This vengeful man? To stick it to every young woman you see? How mature. How insightful. What a visionary. (97)

While Dino is stripped to naked rage, Lucio is momentarily reduced to something pathetic but, like Dino, he gets his parting shot, only Lucio is a much better aim.

Lucio: . . . It’s women like you that make me exist. There’s someone . . . I bet . . . in your life right now . . . that you haven’t even told me about . . . right in front of your eyes that is willing to offer you the world. And what do you do? You dump him for a whore master like me. Now what can be more pathetic? And you want to define me? You have no right? You put yourself in this position. “Daddy hurt me, daddy hurt me.” Who cares? You want to stop what we have, because you want commitment on my part.

What are you, trapped in a movie somewhere? In a grocery store, you’re what they put on sale. Can you understand that? You’re common. You provide no challenge. It’s boring.

Susie: Get out of here!

Lucio: Oh. I’ll be leaving. But you know what the sad thing about all this is? You’re always gonna remember me. That’s the thing. That’s my thing. To be remembered. (99)

Lucio and Susie, the sociometric stars of their milieu and the plays most “experienced” characters, end up alone--reinforcing the play’s trajectory toward a celebration of simplicity and innocence. The other bookends of the drama are the “natural,” spontaneous, creative characters Lira, who keeps making up words that she has no definitions for, and Fernie, the composer, whose mind is full of definitions and objects and concepts which he never has the words for. Through Lira and Fernie, Love and Other Games manages to suggest an underlying analogy between forming relationships and other acts of creation like composing and, I think we can presume, play writing.

The notice on Rossi’s Paradise by the River in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre on the WWW claims:

Reviews were unanimously favourable with Gaëtan L. Charlebois, writing

for Hour , stating, "Caring is what this play, this production and this history

are about. You're not going to find a more interesting or lucid work told

more cogently in a long time...especially not this season. Go."

Actually, the play was, once again, panned by The Globe and Mail, although the Encyclopedia ’s oversight might be explained by the fact that this Rossi play was positively reviewed by Pat Donnelly. Donnelly was won over, in part, because “Rossi isn’t just writing a play here, he’s arguing a case, with amazing dexterity and zeal” (C7). And this time Donnelly allowed herself to be influenced by the reaction of the audience: “Some people are not going to like it. Those people, however, weren’t present on opening night when Paradise by the River

received a lengthy standing ovation, replete with bravos and whistles” (C7).

In discussing the Globe and Mail critique Rossi was clearly frustrated by Kate Taylor’s review and, in particular, by the reviewer’s decision to comment on, of all things, the fact that the program was full of ads for Italian businesses.

. . . in all my years at Centaur, I never recall The Globe and Mail sending their main Toronto theatre critic to fly over to review a play

at Centaur. For some reason, with us, they flew her in and it’s almost like go in and kill this one. I don’t know. That line [about the program] is such a cheap shot. What does that have to do with anything?

If Rossi sounds paranoid, Taylor’s review of Paradise by the River

seems designed to instill paranoia. Taylor found the play too long and wants to claim that Rossi’s talent for writing dialogue escaped him on this play. The core of Taylor’s criticism is that the play has “too many plot lines, too much bad speechifying and too many clichéd emotions” (D6). Not only are we left to wonder what “good” speechifying and “original” emotions might be, but since the criticism is essentially of degree--what are the right number of speeches, emotions and plot lines for a three-hour historical, documentary drama? As Taylor outlines two paragraphs later, there are three plot lines in the play. The first Taylor describes as a “half-baked thriller” in which Maria (his wife) and Cenzo (his brother) try to discover why Romano, a businessman in construction, has been arrested. The conflicts at the internment camp provide the second plot line and a “Romeo-and-Juliet story between Cenzo and Hélène,” (D6) the Québécois neighbour, is the third.

Taylor criticizes the language of the play as “utterly contemporary with an anachronistically liberal use of the f-word” (D6), but the word is used fairly judiciously and almost exclusively in the male-only

internment camps. She complains that the play is “erratically trilingual” (D6). The dialogue in English, French and Italian has to meet the challenge of allowing a unilingual Anglophone to follow the action. Is Taylor really recommending that the play should have been systematically trilingual ( a third in French, a third in English and a third in Italian?), or that all the dialogue be uniformly translated into the other two languages, or is she really saying wouldn’t we all be happier if the whole play was in English? Taylor also claims that “emotions and motivations are so simplistically expressed that they become laughable” (D6) then provides a list of phrases pulled from the play as evidence of her point. But what play or playwright would survive this kind of vivisection of having words and phrases taken out of any context and then judged as facile? Even if we grant Taylor her argument, should characters (and people) who express their emotions in simple terms, especially when speaking a language not their own, be objects of derision?

Taylor’s indifference to the play reaches its peak as she writes: “When the young Fascist asks, ‘Can’t you see this is tearing me apart?’ I can truthfully reply, no, I can’t” (D6). First, we need to imagine what a moment it must have been for the Italian-Canadian community to see the character, Calo, a classical musician, on stage as a reminder of the many Italian immigrants who were not just sympathizers, but supporters of Mussolini. And when Calo utters that he is torn apart it is because that,

having seen how it saved so many Italians from destitution, he has worked in a dedicated and well-intentioned fashion for the cause of Fascism, and only now is he coming to realize “millions are dying” (109) as a result of the alliance of the Fascists and the Nazis. Calo represented not only what must have been a deep schism within the community, but a desperate ambivalence for many individual Italians; the wonder is the reviewer’s ability to be indifferent--the same indifference that allowed her to be comfortable to comment in her review that the “program [was] jammed with ads from Italian businesses . . .” (D6).

The reception of Rossi’s drama has, overall, been positive (I have identified 11 positive and 5 negative reviews), but the significant split in how Rossi has been reviewed indicates a high degree of instability in the critical horizon of expectation. Although Rossi is not what theorists would typically describe as a “postmodernist” playwright, it remains striking that newspaper criticism of his work remains almost untouched by the dominant critical discourses of the last quarter century--the vocabulary and concepts of postmodernism and postcolonialism. There has been almost no critical discourse on the importance of Rossi’s work for, within and as a reflection of the Italian-Canadian community or on the relationship between his work and cultural hegemonies in Canada and North America. Liberal humanist notions of universality and reductionist forms of feminism clearly do not offer stable or favourable

parameters within which to appreciate Rossi’s work. With the exception of Donnelly’s single observation that “Paradise by the River received a lengthy standing ovation, replete with bravos and whistles” (quoted above), the size and loyalty of Rossi’s following within the Italian community has been consistently dismissed or treated with suspicion and derision.

Rossi is a frank defender and critic of his own work. To this day he considers his early one-act play, “Backstreets,” to be his best work.

. . . it was marked by a couple of incidences . . . . One was the overdose in the neighbourhood of a guy who wasn’t really a friend, but someone I knew. And the circumstances surrounding it were terrible. And the other was the death of my cousin. She committed suicide, . . . and that hurt the family a lot. She was a beautiful young girl, eighteen. . . . . [“Backstreets”] is the only play to this day that I have written out of pure, unadulterated anger . . . . And it’s one of the reasons that I think . . . it’s the best play I’ve ever written.

This play about three young Italian men hanging around the local park as they struggle to come to terms with the recent death of a friend from an apparent drug overdose can be seen as a core to all of Rossi’s plays. Just as “Little Blood Brother” brings together three Italian males around the story of one of them just having resisted a homosexual pass from his

friend and teammate on a local hockey team, all of Rossi’s plays are constructed around close relationships fraught with love and anger and confusion about the world.

The modernist and postmodernist century-long attack on realism notwithstanding, Rossi’s drama is an exploration and debunking of cliches and stereotypes--which the critics have been very slow to notice. Despite offering, for the most part, realistic theatre of illusion, Rossi writes about a site where worlds overlap and boundaries are crossed even as the characters seem to be making an effort to hold still. Codes of gender and sexuality and business and language and ethnicity and family and politics collide in Rossi’s plays largely, I suspect, because this is what happens in the world, especially when you are Italian, Canadian, Québécois and an Anglophone and a writer, an actor, a translator and an aspiring director. Rather than too readily prescribing political or social or aesthetic parameters, we would be well served by attending to this drama of conflicting codes and cultures which Rossi is so ready and able to present.

Gregory J. Reid teaches English and Comparative Canadian Literature at the Université de Sherbrooke .

NOTES

FOOTNOTES

1:

Vittorio Rossi’s parents immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1956. Vittorio, the youngest of five children, was born in 1961.

2:

unless otherwise indicated quotations of Vittorio Rossi are from my interview with him at the Cafe Via Crescent, 1418 Crescent Street, Montreal, Wednesday, December 8, 1999.

3:

see the Centaur Theatre web page <http://www.interclik.com/centaur/home.html> in which Gordon McCall writes: "Theatre is the voice of this province. In other provinces, it isn't. Here it is. Centaur is a voice."

4:

There are generally considered to be between 700,000 and 900,000 Anglophones in Quebec. These numbers are “soft” because they include people with a first language (or mother tongue) other than English who live and work in English. In the 1991 census 599,145 Quebecers identified their first language as English. Only 159,145 residents of Quebec identified themselves as English in terms of ethnic origin. Italians outnumbered the ethnically English by 10 % in 1991, making

Italian the single largest ethnic group considered part of the English Quebec community.

5:

for Rossi’s filmography see <http://us.imdb.com/Name?Rossi,+Vittorio+(I)>

6:

for more on the “Black Madonna” see Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum’s Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993, and Sigrid Ulrike Claasen’s The Black Madonna Figure as a Source of Female Empowerment in the Works of Four Italian-Canadian Authors . Université de Sherbrooke: MA thesis (unpublished), 1997.